Jack Parlett...who has mixed feelings, too, about paradise, hugs his ambivalence and makes good literature out of it. His concise, meticulously researched, century-spanning chronicle of queer life on Fire Island captures, with a plain-spoken yet lyric touch, the locale’s power to stun and shame, to give pleasure and symbolize evanescence ... Parlett [is a] skeptical yet definitive narrator of Fire Island’s carnival, a diorama he embellishes with autobiographical asides ... Quick personal vistas turn his book into a hybrid act, a place-based memoir sketching the evolution of a community animated by sexual arrangement ... He pays filial attention to archives and to the table talk of queer elders; intergenerational wisdom lends his tale its crepuscular bite ... At its best, this book enacts a glancing yet trenchant meditation on community, 'ecological precarity' and the fugitive links between place and sexuality ... Parlett’s prose is never messy; its well-timed pulsations bring beach light onto the page.
An island history that’s deeply felt and keenly judged ... Parlett pays lively attention to...conflicts in all their local particularity, never letting the island become an ill-suited synecdoche for queer America more widely. Instead it emerges as a singular place, and an almost improbably influential one ... Fire Island is an intimate history, alive to the importance of dress, sex, bodily alteration, insobriety and dance. It’s aptly punctuated with scenes from the author’s own island visits during a period living in Manhattan.
Among the most poetic and moving parts of this beautifully written book are Parlett’s own memories of New York City, Fire Island, and his growth as a gay man ... Readers of all stripes will appreciate this fast-paced general interest title.
An immersive history of Fire Island and the evolution of LGBTQ culture in 20th-century America ... Parlett excels at portraying literary odd couples who helped shape the culture of Fire Island ... Parlett also does an admirable job illuminating how the Stonewall Riots, the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, and other events affected the island’s gay community, though his attempts to weave in autobiographical reflections are somewhat less effective. Still, this is a rich and rewarding study of Fire Island’s vital role in LGBTQ history and culture.
A vibrant social history ... Uniquely insightful and colorful cultural history ... The author smoothly interweaves an enlightened perspective of the island’s influence and importance with candid appraisals of its shortcomings ... An illuminating, well-written history of a unique place.
